The Underground Man

by Mick Jackson

A novel short-listed for the 1997 Booker Prize offers a humorous portrait of the fifth Duke of Portland, a wealthy, eccentric, nineteenth-century aristocrat who constructed a vast network of underground tunnels from which he could escape to the world outside. Reprint.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Historical, Novels, Contemporary

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Mick Jackson (born 1960) is a British writer from England, best known for his novel The Underground Man (1997). The book, based on the life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and for the 1997 Whitbread Award for best first novel.

Mick Jackson was born in 1960, in Great Harwood, Lancashire, and educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn.

Jackson worked in local theatre, studied theatre arts at Dartington College of Arts, and played in a rock band called The Screaming Abdabs. In 1990, he enrolled in a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, and began working on The Underground Man. He has been a full-time writer since 1995.

Jackson's other works are the novels Five Boys (2002) and The Widow's Tale (2010), and the short story collections Ten Sorry Tales (2006) and The Bears of England (2009). Under the pseudonym Kirkham Jackson, he wrote the screenplay for the 2004 television film Roman Road. He lives in Brighton.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where does eccentricity end and madness begin?

So, perhaps every creature carries inside it a living flame – a modest candlepower. If, for some reason, the flame falters, the creature's existence is put at risk. But if our inner flame flares up and engulfs us, madness is the result.

The main hero has an exceptionally inquisitive mind but he applies it in the strangest ways.
It is better to be ultimately antic than to be a penultimate nonentity.

We are not, as I had feared, simply a camera obscura – just a spectator of the light of the world. No. We are both the camera obscura and the lighthouse. We receive light and we send it out.

As long as there are those who doubt reality, there will be a progress…

[Mohadese · Rating 3 out of 5]

واقعا هیچ حسی نسبت به کتاب ندارم :دی

مرد زیرزمینی داستان یک نجیب‌زاده بریتانیاییه که تصمیم می‌گیره زیر املاک و زمین‌هاش تونل حفر کنه و از طریق این تونل‌ها رفت و آمد کنه.
داستان (که گویا واقعیه) در قالب روزنگاره‌هاست. بخش عمده از روزنگارِ عالیجناب (شخصیت اصلی داستان) هست و در پایان هر فصل روایت کوتاهی از سایر افراد مثل کارمندانش یا مردم عادی می‌خونیم که این‌ها به نحوی مکمل هم هستند.
کتاب یک آشفتگیِ منظم در کنار فضایی به‌شدت تیره‌ای داره و مثل یک باتلاقه، سیر جنون و انزوا ملموس و مشهوده اما برخلاف تصورم شاید به‌خاطر سبک نگارش خیلی باهاش ارتباط برقرار نکردم.
ضمن این‌که یک‌جاهایی خیلی از زیاد از حد اطلاعات اضافی می‌داد که خوندنش در حوصله‌م نمی‌گنجید.
و میگن این کتاب شاهکار نویسنده‌شه...

[Essie Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my - I am entirely in love with this book - or should I say with the main character and narrator: an eccentric, lonely, old Victorian duke who is viewed with a tolerant yet kindly exasperation by those servants and villagers with whom he interacts (from time to time their own views are exposed in 'asides' or short chapters where they seem to be recalling him after his death).

The duke is obsessed with nature and science, his curious mind almost like that of a child as he sets off on whimsical fancies which make little sense to anyone else, but which all have a kind of logical structure within his own fractured mentality.

This is a novel which focuses more on inward events than outward plot, being the musings of a man whose existence has been forever coloured by events that took place in the distant past and for which he is desperately seeking an answer - trying to come up from the 'underground' where something in him has 'fallen away'.

It is terribly sad in places and reduced me to floods of tears. The climax was almost unbearable and a moment of horror had me trying to tear my eyes from the page. But the book also has much humour - and more than once the mad old duke's adventures and ponderings with his staff - along with subsequent misundertandings - had me laughing out loud.

A fantastic creation. A wonderful book. A work of art.

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was about a quarter into this short novel, I said to a friend that it seemed like one of those books you wished you'd stopped reading early, so as not to see bad things happen to a character you'd grown to love. I decided to persevere anyway; I found the narrator so likeable I didn't want to stop once I picked the story up again, much of the writing is beautiful, and Jackson's prose was fast reading compared with most books I've read this year.

There were several occasions when I thought I'd passed that moment where I'd have preferred to stop reading, but each time something different happened from what I'd assumed would happen. Sometimes good - or sometimes a different sort of bad from the expected. (Though, in retrospect, one of these events a reader could have predicted.) This skill in surprising the reader is something to praise in a writer, even if I have other reservations about the novel's project.

From the very first page, this fictional version of the 19th-century 5th Duke of Portland - famed for building tunnels under his Nottinghamshire estate - is a delightful, empathic and amusing individual, at once childlike and perceptive, alert to the details of nature on his outdoor explorations, and highly sensitive to everything around him. (He pays considerable attention to living things above ground, not only to tunnels.)

- Locate a local apple tree. Visit it daily through the summer months. Note how the bud slowly puffs itself up into apple-shape. See how it slowly takes a breath. The weeks roll by until its own increasing weight finally forces the fruit to fall. You will find it on the ground, all ready to eat. This whole process is utterly dependable; has a beginning, a middle and an end. But I am not satisfied. Far from it. Plain baffled is what I am. All sorts of questions remain unanswered. Such as … who taught the tree its apple-conjuring? And … where does the fruit’s flavour come from?

- a row of lime trees, each about fifty feet tall, which hum and fizz right through the summer with their own colony of bees.

- The tuft of hair sticking up at the back of his head, his greatly bewildered air, his elbows pinned to his ribs with cushions all put me in mind of a nest-bound, flightless chick waiting to be fed.

- Encouraged by this, I tried to dream-up other unusual journey-maps and recalled one I have often thought I would like to commission, which is the route taken by an ordinary postal letter. How many pairs of hands must the envelope pass through between the moment it is first dropped in the post box and the moment it lands on the mat?

He seems like a classic case of a poetic, artistic temperament feeling a bit lost because of not being attached to talent … Only the writing here is paradoxically lovely, and I'm not sure suspension of disbelief that this is simply 'a narrative voice' works: these are the character's journal entries, and a 19th century aristocrat who wrote this well would surely have had some nature sketches and poems published at the very least. Jackson's version of the Duke was not always reclusive.

At times, he makes elaborate whimsical associations reminiscent of 90s comedians, active when The Underground Man was being written and published. This one brought to mind Eddie Izzard:

How many whales are there, altogether? Millions, to be sure. The question, therefore, is: what happens to all those whalebones once their owners have passed away? They cannot all of them be picked clean by tiny scavengers and left to rot on the ocean bed. If that were the case there would by now be great piles of them poking out of the oceans. Shipping would have been brought to a halt.
No. The truth is that they are somehow organised – laid out in lines to form some sort of World Bone Network. Who is in charge of the enterprise? An international committee, presumably. No doubt the French are involved.

There also is an incident in the first half of the novel, in a journal entry for November which dramatises something frequently alluded to in laddish comedy and journalism back then, only in a rather different style.

As a teenager, I read a lot of 1980s and 90s historical fiction I found in libraries, and The Underground Man, especially in early chapters before I started to worry what might happen to the Duke, put me back into that space. I've often thought since then that university history made me more likely to nitpick at historical novels, meaning I enjoy them less now. But, reading this, the first new-to-me 90s British historical novel I'd read in a long time, I think there might simply be features of historical novels from this time which I find likeable (no doubt because I read them at a formative age). There is something good-natured in these books, a lightness even when the subjects are not ostensibly light, which one could perhaps link to the 90s as an optimistic and complacent decade in the West following the end of the Cold War. They may also seem naïve now, partly because they are from point in history, and also because these novels are from a time before close attention to intersectionality and representation was expected as standard from literary authors, as it has become in recent years. Yes, servants and poorer people are well-treated and usually kindly spoken of here, and some have short narrative chapters (it's clearly different from a novel of several decades earlier) but the class system and wealth are not questioned, and the main narrator and protagonist of the novel is a nobleman.

There was often a light postmodernism to these 80s and 90s historical novels that interweaved past and present, sometimes overtly with scenes and characters in different periods as in Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee, and sometimes with what seemed to be knowing and playful use of anachronism, but which - I can now see - sometimes got a bit tangled with inaccuracies - as here in The Underground Man. There is a point where it seems like the Duke is going on a tour of alternative medicine practitioners - as a 90s journalist might have done for a feature article or even a book like The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment, taking in aura readers and what sounds like an osteopath. I appreciated these in much the same way as I appreciated the winking appearance of plastic litter in the 15th century Russia of Laurus. (There is also an example of a romanticised attitude to prehistoric humanity that seems more characteristic of the second half of the 20th century than of Victorians; to be continued in a spoiler tag in a comment below once I've researched more.) But these seemed less clever in looking more closely at chronological details of The Underground Man. The real 5th Duke of Portland was born in 1800 and died in 1879; Jackson gives the fictional Duke the birthdate of 12th March 1828 (a writer who evidently matches characters' birthdays, personalities and the standard characteristics of zodiac signs); the fictional duke sounds physically old enough and creaky to be in his seventies, so if he had around the same lifespan, this would be happening in the first decade of the 20th century, though several technologies appear not to exist, suggesting it's set earlier (there are no cars or telephones). The Duke feels that his real problems are to do with the mind, and feels that they are connected with the past and his childhood. In a historical novel that brings osteopathy a little forward in time, and especially if it might be 1906 or so, how come a rich man can't find his way to an early English disciple of Freud? The idea that it could be helpful to talk about problems had been gaining ground more generally by that time; well within the real 5th Duke's lifetime, Charles Dickens had practised a sort of amateur psychotherapy on a friend's wife.

This was one of a number of instances where I felt this lovely character was treated meanly for the sake of plot, convention and allusion. There are a number of parallels with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, though not heavy-handed ones, which were presumably suggested by the idea of calling the Duke, famous for his hobby of having tunnels built under his estate, the Underground Man. Both characters begin their respective stories by saying they don't know about something naturally occurring, one a liver complaint, the other an apple tree. Both feel they have something wrong with them, and spend a lot of time alone. The Duke is known for his beaver-fur hat, Dostoevsky's character gets obsessed with the idea that buying a beaver-fur collar will improve his prestige. Whilst the Duke does not become angry and aggressive like Dostoevsky's Underground Man - and is indeed almost his opposite in his extensive awareness of his own and others' minds - it can seem like there is an attempt to make the characters converge to an extent, by making the Duke somewhat more off-the-wall as the novel progressed. He isn't the cliché (increasingly) nutty unreliable narrator you might expect from that. But it would have been a bolder literary and stylistic choice to let this character simply bumble on as he was, in temperament, at the start. It is, though, debatable how much the character has actually changed over that time: he still sounds just as aware up to a key point very late in the book, and may simply be making choices that *others* find stranger, and they see them in the way they do partly because of his old age.

The second half of The Underground Man appears to be heavily fictionalised, compared with info to be found online about the real 5th Duke: so far as I can tell, the real one did bumble on in his own way until the end - and therefore the novel perhaps does him a disservice. (Depending how much he cared about his image.) It seems possible that Jackson also made him nicer, brighter and more poetic than the real man - not that many people are quite this lovely and interesting. The real Duke, according to people who met him, was sometimes very personable to people such as workmen on his estate, and sometimes wouldn't talk to people, including his own servants. Jackson perhaps found this hard to make sense of, and simply had the Duke push people away later in the book, having previously been quite charming. (I find it quite easy to understand - the workmen are transient and won't be in one's space permanently; the servants, for a Victorian, were always there and felt crowding. I'm sure he'd also have loved the idea of robot servants.) The character of Badger in The Wind in the Willows was also based on the 5th Duke; Badger is undoubtedly more dignified and respected; he is recognised by others around him as being wise - and altogether it is easier to imagine a Victorian gentleman being happy to be portrayed as him than as Jackson's Underground Man.

I'd been vaguely interested in reading The Underground Man for years (first shelved in 2014, based on the US cover of the old man - wiry, as the text says - running through the woods, and the innocent, fun-sounding blurb, "Offers a humorous portrait of the fifth Duke of Portland, a wealthy, eccentric nineteenth-century nobleman who constructed a vast network of underground tunnels from which he could escape to the world outside.") In June-July 2020, it's now part of a group read of the 1997 Booker longlist. This seems like a book to provoke mixed opinions, especially among those who wouldn't have otherwise chosen to read it: it depends a great deal how much you like eccentricity, whimsy, nature writing and flights of fancy in poetic prose - and if you like those a lot it may also be sad or frustrating, because you appreciate the writing and personality.

(Read & reviewed May 2020.)

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize

The Mookse and the Gripes group are revisiting the 1997 Booker Prize this month, and I am planning to read or reread all six of the books - this was the first. I know very little about Mick Jackson, or the 5th Duke of Portland, whose tunnels in his estate at Welbeck Abbey were Jackson's starting point. I have walked through the grounds of Welbeck Abbey as part of the Robin Hood Way, and must have walked past some of the tunnel sites, but I didn't register them at the time.

Fortunately the tunneling project plays a minor role in this book, and although much of the history is well-founded, the Duke himself is very much a product of Jackson's imagination. We see his eccentricities, often driven by legitimate scientific questions, as they gradually descend into madness.

I won't attempt a more detailed review, as Antonomasia has already done that better than I could here.

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book from my library because it said it was nominated for Booker Prize and I just wanted some real literature and not the fluff that my library offer consists of mostly.
Then I found out it was about a weirdo who digs up tunnels.
When I started reading it I realised the said weirdo is also the narrator so I would have to struggle through 260 pages of his ramblings.
I thought "Oh no, what have I got myself into?" - being obsessive-compulsive as I am I just need to finish every book I start.

Luckily before I knew it I was drawn into Mick Jackson's most elegant prose. He created an intriguing fictional character loosely based on the real fifth Duke of Portland.
His Grace's curiosity of a child, obsession with tunnels, his own body and its organs, all his eccentric ways make it quite of a page-turner even if there is not much of a storyline. It was disturbing at times and laugh out loud funny at others. My favourite funny bit must be when the Duke discoveres a worldwide conspiracy involving whalebones and women.

All in all, definitely a character-driven novel, but what a character.

[fคrຊคຖ.tຖ · Rating 4 out of 5]

بیشتر داستان مونولوگ است.
سیر صعودی روان‌پریشی یک دوک پیر.

[Hana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upgrading this one from three and a half to a full four star after meditating on the boundaries between fact and fiction and how to judge the one and the other (see discussion below).

A strange story of eccentricity, wealth and one man’s descent into madness. The Underground Man is by turns lyrical, comic and then tragic.

I had very mixed emotions about this one and it’s not for everyone. I admired the artistry, the poetic descriptions, the deft interweaving of His Grace’s diary with testimony from befuddled and sometimes horrified minions, but the Duke of Portland’s spiraling madness left me disturbed and depressed and I could barely make myself read the final pages. That I suppose is a tribute in itself. I had come to care for this shy, lonely man, who in another time or place might have had a very different fate.

Perhaps if William John Cavendish Bentinck-Scott, the fifth Duke of Portland, had been an ordinary man his father or maybe later, wife, would have beaten him upside the head a few times and said: “quit your dawdling—go get a job!” But his Grace was less fortunate. He was born to wealth and privilege, a member of the Victorian aristocracy that raised weirdness to a fine art.

What ailed His Grace? As Mick Jackson paints him in this fictionalized biography, the Duke seems at first to be a painfully awkward, reticent man afflicted merely with an overabundance of imagination along with a raging case of hypochondria. In Victorian England those leanings could be fatal.

The Duke’s early journal observations are beautiful, original and enticing. Sylvia Plath’s visions also had a kind of beauty, but her mind-pictures were hard, sharp, glittering and dangerous, while the Duke seems merely gifted with another layer of sight that lets him imagine what it is to be an apple tree, and yet again, the bud of a blossom on the tree, opening slowly, unfurling, filling, fruiting.

The poor Duke. He had no wife, no relatives, only a valet, loyal but in the end someone who could only obey orders. There is one touching scene when, during the very cold winter of the story, a large lake on the estate freezes over and the estate’s tenant farmers and townspeople ask permission to skate. Night after night His Grace watches them from a window far above and at last his valet forcibly bundles him out to the pond, wrapped in layer after protective layer, straps on primitive skates and sends His Grace out for a glorious and utterly unexpected spin.

Then the Duke’s visions take a more sinister turn—a small child/cherub/incubus begins to escort him everywhere. His Grace senses that something is wrong with ‘his head’ and falls into the clutches of an Edinburgh phrenologist whose ravings seem to embody every misguided notion that the era ever birthed. What in the end was wrong with the Duke? With a night-tray full of potentially lethal patent remedies, along with mercenary quacks on call, it could have been almost anything.

Taken purely as a novel, The Underground Man is quite extraordinary, but with fictionalized biography I always find myself wondering what is true (or at least somewhat documented) and what is imagination?

The Underground Man fails abysmally here—the author’s introduction was annoyingly coy about what the real Duke’s life was like and what precisely was fact-based in the story. It seems that Mick Jackson did a fair bit of primary research but that only makes the transgression worse. Nothing that I’ve found in several initial web searches has given me any clear sense of the book’s sources. When a 20-21st century writer makes a very private man a central figure in a supposedly historical novel, he owes it both to the memory of his protagonist—and to modern readers—to provide more documentation. In a pure history this failing would have knocked my rating down to two or even one star. I’m giving a little ‘grace’ here for the compassionate portrait of His Grace, which may or may not be a nearly complete fabrication.

Content rating PG for the descent into madness.

[setoude.s · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب راجع به به اشرافی انگلیسی که دچار فروپاشی و تحول درونی میشه و از خیلی جهات شبیه کتاب تارک دنیا مورد نیاز است و فانتزی بود و برای من دلنشین بود

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hiába, van az úgy, hogy a felszínen gondozott angolparkot látunk nett udvarházzal, de a föld alatt nyirkos járatok hálózata ásít sötéten. Jackson könyve tulajdonképpen nem más, mint tárlatvezetés egy zavart elmében - elbeszélője, a "vakondherceg" úgy bolyong tudata szomorú, vizes síkján, mint aki végképp elveszett, és minden egyes lépés csak egyre elveszettebbé teszi. A világ - és benne saját gondolatai - egy végtelenül bonyolult, titkos kódként jelennek meg előtte, amit kényszeresen próbál megfejteni. Csak hát az a helyzet, hogy minél elszántabban kutatja a válaszokat, annál mélyebbre merül a lápban. A szerző ezt a kálváriát pontosan és ráérősen ereszti rá az olvasóra, csak lassan bontja ki, az ember sokáig nem is fogja fel, nem is akarja felfogni, ez a kényelmes séta miféle nyomorult pincékbe vezet. Aztán a végén ott áll a sötétben, és annak örül, hogy ha becsukja a könyvet, ő megszabadul. Szegény herceggel viszont mi lesz?

[Dianah (onourpath) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on the real life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the fifth Duke of Portland, The Underground Man explores the psychology behind an eccentric, reclusive man who is just a bit too delicate to navigate society. Welbeck Abbey, his grand castle in Nottinghamshire, became well-known for its maze of tunnels running in all directions underneath the castle grounds. However, the tunnels were only a part of his manic push to build an underground space. Employing thousands of men over many years, the duke also constructed an underground library, horse stable, and ballroom, which was the largest in England (a man who abhorred contact with others, he failed to see the absurdity of building such a massive ballroom). He was kind to his employees and was the largest employer in the area during the height of his estate's construction. He had an ice skating rink built on his property, and encouraged his staff to use it. He provided all of his construction workers with an umbrella and a donkey. Living in isolation in a tiny part of his grand castle, the Duke wouldn't speak directly to staff members and communicated by passing notes through little slots cut into the walls of his rooms. He saw no one except his butler, not even his own physician. His staff was instructed to ignore his presence if they happened upon him in the hallway. The Duke had trap doors installed in his rooms for easy escape to the tunnels below. If he had to go to London, he was sealed in a carriage and proceeded unobserved throughout the journey. All of the rooms he occupied in the castle were painted pink. After his death, hundreds of boxes were found in one room, each containing one wig. As Bill Bryson states in his travel book Notes from a Small Island, "This was, in short, a man worth getting to know." Yet the Duke had a seemingly normal beginning, including an admirable military career, a brief political career as a Tory MP, and an unrequited love early in his life. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1997, The Underground Man digs deep beneath the surface of the Duke's eccentricities, showing him to be a sensitive soul, and prods into his childhood to try to illuminate his strange actions. As odd as the details are, Mick Jackson has no trouble encouraging his reader to fall in love with the Duke. Sweet, amusing, and befuddled, the fifth Duke of Portland is a character you will never forget.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book after joining a Goodreads group re-reading the 1997 Booker shortlist – a year that even the judges seem to have disowned. Having now read 5 of the six strong (although that’s not really the right word) shortlist I can see why.

I want nothing this shortlist’s got.

The book takes as a starting point the life of the 5th Duke of Portland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Be...) – albeit retaining little other than his eccentricity and in particular the series of underground tunnels that he had built). The story which takes place over around six months is told in the first person from the duke’s journals (itself I felt a rather contrived literary device which set the tone for the novel), interspersed with the brief accounts of various members of his household staff.

As the story progresses, the duke’s eccentricity processes via hypochondria and hauntings (from a ghostly boy’s head – which reminded me of Ali Smith’s “Winter”) to an obsession with medical matters of neck, head and skull, and thereafter into increasing paranoia with the attempts of his staff to preserve what remains of his sanity, into the almost complete surrender of it.

All of this (in perhaps the strongest part of the novel) is shot through with: a lifelong regret that his early love turned down his marriage proposal, only to die some time after marrying another; a sense of a unfulfillment in his role, as duke, which came to him too early when his parents died in his early twenties; and an increasing sense (via vivid dreams and memories) of a only partly remembered beach incident which somehow defined his childhood.

(At the end of the book the Duke realises that his twin brother died when they were 4 – drowned when the family ignored advice and took a carriage ride on a beach only to be caught out my mist and incoming tides).

On one level this is a gentle and largely harmless novel – fitting the way in which Jackson sets out the character of the duke.

But it simply failed to work for me – the character of the duke is crucial and yet I found it an unconvincing one.

The duke seems to be weak in empathy and understanding of others or himself, and yet within his journal entries are samples of his writing which are the deepest and most (only) poetical parts of the book.

He is (by his own admission) hopelessly impractical – both shoelaces and telling right from left, continued to defeat him into his teens and yet he is able to conceive of a network of underground tunnels and latter carry out a form of Brain surgery on himself.

Even though relatively short and easy to read, too much of the book feels like padding – for example a trip to what we would now call a chiropractor takes 5 or so pages in which (at least to my reading) nothing of interest happens – so we simple end up with a lengthy description of his spine being manipulated – perhaps fascinating to him but not to this reader.

And a part when he causes an explosion with his own wind is taken straight from the page of Viz, or perhaps an Episode of Bottom (neither without merit but neither having a place in a literary novel).

I felt like the writing was stuck in a rut and I wasn’t happy with what I got to read.
I felt the author should have strived for more - I really couldn’t see the point.

Another disappointment from an extremely underwhelming year of the Booker.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a book I didn't care to finish. It was a little too odd and too long. Maybe I'd have stuck with it if it was odd and short. I did copy one good passage from it before letting it go.

"I have always been very fond of dogs. Cats have much too high an opinion of themselves and generally make for poor company. Are, on the whole, utterly humorless and always wrapped up in their own thoughts. Some days I reckon all cats are spies. Dogs, on the other hand, are reassuringly foolish and always game for a roll-around."
I fully concur, Mr. Jackson.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a strange, poetic, and (dare I say?) hopeful little book! As the eccentric Duke of Portland enters the last year of his life, he struggles with the degeneration of his body and mind. With a childlike curiosity, he follows his research wherever it will take him... This book of a sweet, smart, and probably crazy old man's precipitous decline would just be horribly sad if told from anyone else's point of view (even an omniscient narrator's) but since we're locked inside the Duke's skull, it's hard to see it that way. Instead, it's just kind of beautiful.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Opening: FROM HIS GRACE'S JOURNAL

SEPTEMBER 30TH

I have no idea how an apple tree works. The quiet machine beneath the bark is quite beyond my ken.

How complimentary this is to my last non-fic read 'The Head Gardeners'!

Later: this was just a little too whacky for my taste. Maybe I'll have another bash at it someday, when I have more of a Goon Show head on.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this book. I know that I didn't enjoy it because I could only read 20-30 pages at a time and fell asleep whilst reading it more than once. I find this very upsetting because I really thought I was going to love it. Everything about it appealed to me; the story of a mad Duke building a labyrinth of tunnels under his huge, sprawling estate to escape from a dark secret that haunts him, the cover of the book, OH the cover, is so gorgeous and sepia and steampunk and creepy and, lastly, because I have read two other very good books by the same author: 'Ten Sorry Tales' and 'Bears of England'. So why did this one which I was looking forward to THE MOST have to be so boring?! The quote on the cover is taken from 'Observer' who say that the book was 'Quite Simply, Astonishing'. I can only assume that this quote was taken by a casual observer on the street who has only seen the cover and not actually read it rather than THE Observer because absolutely nothing about this book was astonishing. NOTHING I TELL YOU!

The protagonist is dull. Dull, dull, dull. He is not the eccentric yet lovable duke character that every quote on the back tells you he is; he is rambling and inane and unoriginal. Not an interesting, memorable literary character but more a trying-too-hard attempt by the author to be offbeat and wacky. Bleurgh. The story is narrated by the Duke through diary entries (again, BLEURGH) so you never know how much to believe what you are told. But this is not done well; it's not so much I didn't believe him but, rather, I felt what he was saying in 2 pages only warranted a sentence. If you want a really good unreliable narrator where you're unsure whether what your being told is true read 'Pale Fire' by Nabokov. Much better as the plot is intricate enough to really be able to see how you are being manipulated and still be surprised at the end.

The tunnels are never explained. They are the main selling point of the novel yet they are never explained. This is a sin. They are also described in a really strange way which makes it hard to picture them in your head. They are also not labyrinthine and spooky but straight and with skylights. I don't know why this bothers me but it does! An early account from the man hired by the Duke to dig them ruins the mystique of them immediately. People keep saying this novel harks back to gothic novels, largely because of these tunnels. How!? To me, it doesn't feel Gothic at all.

The 'twist' at the end. I don't want to say too much but...it's not a twist in my opinion. The Duke's erratic behaviour is not explained. It appears his 'descent into madness' that the blurb has already told us will happen only really means the last 50 pages or so, not the whole novel. So the other shit he was doing was fine and needs no explanation. Again, infuriating.

Lastly, the main issue I have with this novel is the blurb and the Goodreads description and every place that gives you a synopsis of the plot. In this review, I have touched on these descriptions, which I did to highlight how wrong they are. Not only are they misleading, but they actually ruin the book. If the Duke was not presented as this madman with a secret everywhere and just a normal man, it would be more interesting because then the reader would make up their own mind. As it is, because I already knew what I was supposed to be getting, I was constantly expecting there to be some big reveal at the end and for everything he had said to have been through completely different eyes to everyone else (like a proper Gothic twist e.g- he's locked in an insane asylum and has been skewing events to imagine he's living the life he describes. I'm not saying this would be a good twist just that I was expecting something like that- more dramatic, more Shutter Island. What I got was more Shitter Island). This novel has been marketed all wrong.

OK so why did I give it three stars? Because it is well written. If it was marketed differently it would be a good novel. If emphasis wasn't placed so much on the tunnels, as if they are a huge part of the plot, this review would probably be a lot different. As it is, I am annoyed that I was so excited for this book and it let me down so brutally.

[Dennis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book which starts in the middle of nowhere and finishes like the writer ran out of ideas; that is to say that it had no real plotline, just a string of incidents and then the string ran out. I'm not a great fan of books about "lovable nitwits" or eccentric aristocracy, nor do I care much about how they got that way; the book is rather sketchy about the duke's past and a last-minute attempt to explain why he was how he was fell flat, in my opinion because it had a sense of being tossed in at the end in an attempt to give some meaning to all that went before rather than being some logical development. I'm very happy that the duke was such a swell guy wwho cared about everyone - even though he didn't really understand anyone or anything and was a huge pain to his caretakers - but that wasn't enough. An easily forgettable book, more parentheses than full stop, and not to be lamented if it's missed.

[Leila Lotfy · Rating 4 out of 5]

حالتی از ذهن که هوشیاری می‌خوانیمش چیست، اگر خروج مدام از يک تونل نباشد؟

What is that state of mind we call “consciousness” if not the constant emerging from a tunnel?

All I want is to let a little light in. To let a little of me out into the world.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Mookse and the Gripes group here on GR is reading the 1997 Booker shortlist in June 2020 and I decided to read all 6 books (one, the winner that year, will be a re-read, but the other 5 are all new to me).

This books takes as a starting point the historical character of the 5th Duke of Portland, the wonderfully named William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck. The Duke is famous for his eccentricity and for the elaborate maze of tunnels he had built under his house (Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire). But, as far as I can work out, fact and fiction quickly separate and much of the plot here is entirely the product of Jackson’s imagination. Discovering that plot is perhaps one of the few things to enjoy in the book, so I won’t make any mention of it here.

This book really didn’t work for me. It is written, mostly, as diary entries by a man who clearly has a lot of things going on in his rather strange mind. I didn’t take to him, although it’s hard not to start to feel some sympathy for him as the book progresses and you spend time listening to his thoughts, and I found the style a bit too whimsical (thanks to Antonomasia for that word). It’s true that the style gradually changes (or you get used to it as you read - not sure which), but by the time I settled to it, the damage had been done.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written novel, very very loosely based on the life of the 5th Duke of Portland. He’s written as a kind but truly eccentric individual with a bundle of neuroses. I enjoyed this novel thoroughly until the ending, which I hated. The character of the Duke deserved a better conclusion. I would have appreciated a historical blurb from the author, providing details of the real Duke’s life.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poignant I think is the main word I'd use to describe this novel. An unusual protoganist but I enjoyed following his story and thoughts

[The Super Moop · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this a few weeks ago on the strength of the cover picture (which I fell in love with instantly), and what little information I could glean from the blurb at the back (which wasn't very much at all).

I'd never heard of this Mick Jackson before, and I certainly know nothing of the life and doings of the particular Duke of Portland who (very loosely) forms the basis for the central character of this novel. This means that, for the first time in a very long time, I've had to approach a book not knowing what to expect at all.

The book is structured as a series of loosely strung vignettes, which range from the hilarious to the heartbreaking, mostly in first person narrative by the Duke himself. The précis at the back says he is "an inspired hypochondriac, a true naif, a fount of nineteenth century curiosity, a sweet and strange man", which is exactly right as he is in fact revealed to be all of these things over the course of the book.

It has barely any plot, so people who like their fiction fast-paced are advised to steer well clear. However, like many of my favourite books, it weaves a cosy, self-contained reality of its own that one can temporarily inhabit. It shows us life through the eyes of an eccentric old man who, over time, gives in to his melancholia and his inwardness until it overwhelms him altogether.

Perhaps it loses a little steam towards the end, and eventually comes to a close a bit too abruptly, but I've always been fond of these introverted books which carry their own little worlds around like snails carrying their shells.

What is most masterful about this novel is the completeness of the central character, who is elaborate and subtle enough to allow us to spend time with him without losing patience.

I'm glad I bought it.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this singular account is drawn largely from the (fictional) journals of the Duke of Portland, a historical personage in early Victorian times. Among his many eccentricities, the Duke was most noted for creating miles and miles of underground passages throughout his estate. He traveled only by subterranean passage, even while riding by coach. (Obviously, he was a man of considerable means.)

Jackson's book creates a vivid portrait of a striking eccentric, a man of singular intelligence held captive by his numerous uncontrolled manias, delusions, and hypochondria. It's an account that's by turns sad, touching, and humorous. The Duke's musings are interlarded with observations by his staff and various acquaintances, interjecting a note of "normalcy" that sets off the Duke's eccentricities to greater effect. All in all, a very convincing psychological sketch of the inner workings of an eccentric. I found the Duke and his strange subterranean world quite believable and the man himself sadly endearing. The book rolls along to a striking conclusion, which I won't reveal, but which is sadly fitting.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it love it love it!

I had Jim Broadbent in my mind as the Duke!

It's simply marvellous. Jackson writes (in my opinion, at least) so very well and I simply could not put the book down.

The fact blended with fiction, the intrigue as to what indeed was the truth. There were so many laugh-out-loud moments. Truly is a book I'd read again – and I rarely read a book twice now. Too many others to go at!

Whether you're familiar with the area and the history or not, you can't help but be enticed by this eccentric character.

I do wish they'd make a film of it! And film it at Welbeck itself! Can you imagine!

I read this book some years ago now and my memory is poor enough, but I remember loving the character of the Duke, Jackson really drawing the radar in to care about this odd fellow and his crazy obsessions and manner.

[علی محمدی · Rating 4 out of 5]

یک دوک مالیخولیایی که علی‌رغم احمق بودن، ارزش زیادی برای تفکر قائل است و برای هرچیز نظریه‌ای ساده‌انگارانه دارد؛ روایت کلی داستان اتفاقاتی‌ست که در یادداشت‌های روزانه عالیجناب ثبت شده، دوک پیری که با بیماری دست و پنجه نرم میکند، به انزوایی خود خواسته کشیده میشود و دچار فروپاشی ذهنی میشود. جذابیت اصلی داستان اما در خورده روایات‌هایش بود؛ دیدار باغبان پیر که چهره پیری و مرگ را به دوک نشان میدهد، گیرمال نابینا که جهان بینی دوک را تغییر می‌دهد، دو خواهر که مدعی هستند درون بدن را میبینند و توانایی درمان دارند، دو خدمتکار که در تلاش برای محافظت از دوک هستند، دستگیری جوان معلولی که استعداد ریاضی عجیبی دارد در ملک دوک، حفر تونلهایی در املاک دوک، غارگردی با کشیش و گم شدن در خیابانها. در حین خواندن رمان چنان با دوک احساس نزدیکی به وجود می‌آید که انگار عضوی از خانواده است.
کتاب مرد زیر زمینی از آن دست کتابهاست که شاید از ترس تمام شدن بشود نیمه رهایش کرد.

[Salivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

جذابترین بخش آثار میک جکسون اینه که عجیب و غریب ترین پیشامد‌های ممکن رو انقدر ساده و ملموس به جریان درمیاره که آدم موقع خوندنش نمیتونه لذت نبره.موضوع کتاب چیزی جدیدی نیست،یه پیرمرد منزوی که بیماری ها اخیر باعث شده یه مقداری مرگ رو نزدیکتر از قبل ببینه و همین امر موجب شده که به تمام پدیده‌های اطرافش از جنبه‌ی مرگ و زندگی نگاه کنه.

[Nadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

داستانی درباره‌ی پیرمردی منزوی در قرن ۱۹ که از اتفاقات روزمره‌ش می‌گوید.. کتاب داستان جمع و جور و سرراستی دارد اما خواندنی است. یعنی میک جکسون اصولا داستان‌هایی را که چندان پیچیده نیست به نحوی روایت می‌کند که مخاطب جذبش می‌شود. به دوستانی که کتاب‌هایی را که پشتشان فکری نهفته دوست دارند پیشنهاد می‌کنم. ترجمه هم قابل قبول بود اما دست

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly brilliant. Laugh out loud funny, very engaging, beautifully written - and I gasped out loud on the train at the gothic twist towards the end. Highly recommended.

[Edith · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland (1800-1879) was a very unusual man: he built a complex network of tunnels under his house (an abbey in the days before Henry VIII); he was so reclusive that he did not speak to his servants, nor they to him--one who tipped his cap to the duke was dismissed; when he traveled to London, he had his carriage driven into a specially built railway carriage, and drove off when the train arrived in the city. In his earlier and apparently less antisocial period, he served in the army for five years and was later an MP for King's Lynn. He never married and had no legitimate children, but is believed to have fathered three children illegitimately. He became his father's heir as result of the death of his elder brother. Thus, the real Duke.

The duke of "The Underground Man" is certainly based on the duke of Portland, but he has been worked on by the imagination of Mick Jackson, and his life story departs more and more from that of the real man as we observe him gradually progress from eccentricity to madness. The novel takes the form of entries from the duke's journal, occasionally interspersed with what seem to be interviews with various staff members and employees.

The duke's journal entries are beautifully rendered. The elderly duke is revealed as compassionate, warm-hearted, introverted, curious, philosophical, and obsessed with his own inner workings both mental and physical. His picture of himself is humorous, perceptive, poignant, and increasingly odd. He searches for a memory of the past which becomes clearer as his mental state deteriorates. The entries are so seductive that the reader is really in need of the occasional comment, however inaccurate, of a maidservant or a stone mason to bring him or her back from the world that Jackson has created in the duke's mind.

I thought this book nearly perfect of its kind, almost magical. Whether it is everyone's cup of tea is doubtful, but in my opinion, it is well worth the experiment of reading.*

* I found the Goodreads short description of this novel as "a humorous portrait of the 5th duke of Portland" misleading. There are certainly elements of humor in the novel, and some very amusing scenes, but this is not a funny book. And it certainly isn't a straightforward biography of the duke of Portland, but only based on, and inspired by, his life.

[Chris Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well this is a tough one to review. It’s beautifully written, with one of the most idiosyncratic yet sympathetic narrators in recent memory, and it’s never less than charming or, towards the end, unnerving. But it also has zero interest in rushing to its inevitable and tragic conclusion. It saunters, it meanders, it gets as delightedly distracted as our central character when it is suddenly dazzled by a moment of unexpected beauty and strangeness

But it is also, unfortunately, incredibly hard to motivate yourself to keep going with a book with so little incident. It’s never bad, it’s always full of small and wonderful moments of joy that will stick with me for years BUT it’s such a struggle to keep going with it because it’s so unbothered by such concepts as plot and pacing. Which is not a bad thing at all, but I suspect you need to be in some way prepared for a book that’s in no hurry to go anywhere